Whew! Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.

The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

Here, a big problem with the press-release-based submission is that depression is a disease that goes into spontaneous remission, on different schedules for different patients, so to say "Patient was given a treatment, and the patient started feeling better" proves nothing when n = 1, and doesn't prove much even with much larger sample sizes until careful statistical analysis of the patient sample is done as part of a thoughtful comparison with a control group. Some depression patients get better regardless of the treatment, and some unfortunate patients stay depressed even when given treatments that are known to be reasonably effective in the general population. Depression is a polygenic, multifactorial disease, a disruption of the complicated mood regulatory system in the human brain, with its several interacting feedback loops, so no two depression patients are seeking care with exactly the same underlying disease state.

It was interesting, by the way, to see the mention of research at Medtronic in the submission here, as that is a LARGE local company in which many of my friends work, and at which one of my immediate relatives worked not long ago (although he worked on a different kind of medical device, not on a brain device). As heart disease rates continue to decline worldwide,

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

the former bread-and-butter of medical device companies (heart pacemakers and other heart devices) are a shrinking part of the market, long-term, so the medical device makers are doing research to see if other human diseases can be treated with electrical medical devices. I think the people who conduct research at medical device companies are persons of integrity who desire to help sick people, but it is MUCH too early to predict that a medical device will ever be a first-line treatment for human mood disorders. Much more research on safety and effectiveness still needs to be done before that happens.

P.S. There was quite a good recent thread here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4511188

with helpful advice about what to do about depression.